Memories of Leng
by Gandalf the Beige
Summary: Where the lines between knowledge, power and survival become blurred, it presents many places for evil to reside.  But one must choose wisely when to shoot, when to speak, when to listen... and when to leave well enough alone.
1. Secrets

**Memories of Leng**

Disclaimer: I do not own anything. All (or most) of the material contained herein belongs to either Howard Philip Lovecraft or August Derleth. Delta Green (such as it is) belongs to Pagan Publishing. And for concepts that come later in the story... well, creatures of legend that can totally freeze a person's brain have always had their place in the public domain, but Peter S. Beagle deserves credit for his take on the kind that inspire beatific rapture instead of gibbering terror.

Summary: Joseph Clayton always suspected that Marie Trinh was hiding something about her family, but never knew what it was. When he finally finds out what... well, the first step on the road to enlightenment is often quite a doozy. Then, the question becomes what to _do _with that enlightened knowledge.

Authors Note: There will be Lovecraftian horror in this story, after a fashion. However, there will also be humour and wonder and quite some affection. There will also be aspects more apropos to a Howardian barbarian story or a Burroughs Englishman than to the academics that Lovecraft sometimes wrote about: bravery, sacrifice (in more ways than one) and familiarity even in the most unlikely of places.

**Glaston, upper Worcester Co., Massachusetts (roughly analogous to Gardner)**  
><strong>October 27, 2007.<strong>

An autumnal chill descended upon the streets of Glaston as the young man walked upon the concrete sidewalk, passing redbrick storefronts and shop windows, every surface still wet with the morning rain. Leaves, red and orange and each vibrant in their hue, were shaken loose from the trees lining the street by the wind, landing wherever they fell. For an instant in time, the spectacle of the leaves drew the attention of the man, in fact little more than a teenage boy, as he made his way toward the corner. However, Joseph Clayton, clad in bluejeans and jacket with a backpack slung from his shoulders, had far more important things to focus on than a show of falling leaves. An important test for this semester was arriving in a week or so and he needed to study.

Also, he was getting quite hungry this close to lunch.

As Joseph rounded the corner and continued toward his favorite eatery, he wondered if he would get swamped in the usual lunch crowd. However, as he saw the front of the Leng Trinh Restaurant, his thoughts turned to quiet dejection.

"Damnit!" muttered Joseph as he approached the eatery. The reason for this turn in mood was the carpet of tempered glass fragments on the sidewalk below the picture window at the front of the establishment, which was now covered by plastic sheeting. Thuch Van Trinh, one half of the husband-and-wife ownership, was wearing a plaid jacket over his apron and usual cooking clothes and was shoveling the broken glass into a bucket. "Hey, Mr. Trinh, how's it going?". Joseph asked with a smile. This was more false cheer than anything, as Joseph could guess how Thuch must be feeling: anger was always a popular choice, followed closely by worry about the reason why.

Despite what he must have been feeling, Thuch Van Trinh grinned back, the black lines of his facial tattooing creasing as the muscles moved under his cheeks. "Not so good, Mr. Clayton. If this keeps up, I may have to put in Plexiglas so that the window won't break." The Trinhs accents, as his parents and the other adults of the town told it, had been rather strong (even unusually so) when they had immigrated to Glaston from their first home in Boston. This had usually been waved off by their purported origins in the remote hills on the Vietnam-Laos border, seemingly collaborated by how their teeth had been dyed black. On the other hand, given their rural roots, their speed in adapting local speech patterns so that they now sounded more like second generation Americans (and especially their daughter's complete lack of any accent except the local standard) did make for a puzzling situation. However, for their ease of assimilation and the food they served, they had become well-liked in the community.

So why were things like _this _happening to them recently? "How many times does this make this month; two, three?" Joseph had to ask this, wondering if things were worse than he thought.

"It's happened three times already, this time not more than an hour ago. Thanh wants to install security cameras to watch the place and with how small and cheap they are now, I think we just might." _An hour ago? They'd smashed a picture window in broad daylight? Who in town could be that stupid or that angry? _Josephs train of thought was broken then, when Thuch said something of much more interest to the younger man. "By the way, if you're looking for Marie, she's helping her mother in the kitchen. Even without a window we seem to be doing good business." Thuch went back to his work and Joseph, not wanting to delay any longer, entered the restaurant.

Just as Thuch had said, _Leng Trinh _still had it's usual busy lunchtime crowd, albeit one that was concentrated near the back wall. Picking his way around tables packed with diners, Joseph finally arrived at a table set for two, a 'reserved' sign upon it. Removing his backpack and laying it beside a chair, he sat down, shuffled off his coat and went to bury his nose in the menu.

It always felt a bit odd to Joseph, eating in an ethnic restaurant where none of the diners were the same ethnicity as the cooks, or even from the same part of the world. However, none of it mattered when the food was as good as it was here.

"Now then, what would a fine, upstanding New England boy like yourself want in a place like this?" The voice that asked this was soft, amused, female and had an almost mocking tone. It also had the accent of the New England uplands. To Joseph, it could only be one person.

"The same thing I always get here." He answered dryly before looking up from the menu. There, holding a pad of paper and a pen, was teenage girl with almond-shaped eyes, shoulder length black hair with green streaks, a cooking apron and an amused grin. "Hi Marie... you sure your mom's alright with you waitressing this crowd?"

"We've got enough help in the kitchen already and Dad's coming in after all the glass is cleaned up." She glanced up at the window, plastic sheet and all, after she wrote his order down. "I just wish we knew who was doing this. If we don't get someone else to cough up some money, our insurance company might go sour on us." Marie went back to the kitchen to get the food for both of them.

Ten minutes later, she was laying out two place settings of food that had been prepared ahead of time. "Alright, that's two plates of grilled pork on beds of Leng-style rice, your dish of steamed green beans with soy sauce for dipping, my bowl of soup and two cans of soda." They'd eat lunch before studying, with Joseph paying the tab for both of them.

If anyone asked, it wasn't a date. Not in the strictest sense, anyway.

"What, no _bak bon dzhow_?" Asked Joseph, decidedly disappointed at the apparent lack of the special ingredient.

To this, Marie moved a small earthen bowl from the serving tray onto the table and lifted the lid to reveal a thick gray sauce containing mushrooms and cracked black pepper. "Would I be one to deny you the gravy of the gods?" She asked (rhetorically) with a soft smile; Joseph couldn't help but smile back as he cracked the tab on his soda and began on his green beans.

A bit later, when his beans were gone and Marie had almost finished her soup, Joesph began formulating a question that related to a curious thought that had sprung up earlier. "Not to sound like a nag or anything, but I'm just curious but what was all that 'upstanding' stuff about?" The only time he had ever heard anyone talk like that was...

_Oh God..._

Marie swallowed the last bits of her soup. "Oh, I don't know. Maybe It's that I had no idea that the son of insurance brokers had such deep and aristocratic roots? Maybe it's that I was surprised to find out that the Clayton's had come not from hardy New England farming stock as I had assumed, but from the urbane, wealthy ranks of those grand Brahmins of Boston? I'm sure Granny Cora could tell some fascinating stories about the old days; she sure seemed interested in mine." If anything, Marie took the entire thing in stride, treating both the memory of the experience and the experience itself with a a great deal of interested amusement. Certainly, mocking the type of language she had encountered was almost cracking her up.

Joseph, on the other hand, had first felt bemusement at the scene in which the Clayton family reunion of the past summer had found itself, quickly turning into outright embarrassment. "Look, I'm sorry that I didn't tell you about her, but everybody thought that she wouldn't be able to come due to health concerns. It's not my fault that a half-senile, 97 year old woman worked up enough stubbornness to drag her nurse halfway across the state!".

"I never said anything about anyone being at fault. I just thought it was an interesting revelation about your family." She had meant her cajoling in good humour, but Josephs defensiveness and embarrassment were never good emotions to bring out. "Anyway, most people would be proud to have the Boston gentry in their family history: industrialists, merchants, art, culture, philanthropy, charity..." With every word, Marie spooned a bit of _ban boc dzhow _onto her grilled pork.

"As well as whaling, slave trading, opium smuggling, snobbery and having your entire life guided by the expectations of your peers; exactly the sorts of things my parents taught me to loathe. The thing is, my great-great-grandmother came from a very select, very privileged and lily-white background; I was worried that she'd... well, react oddly to you." Joseph retorted as he began spooning (or rather, pouring) the sauce onto his meat after Marie had finished with it and passed it to him. In the case of Cora Clayton (nee Coffin), Josephs fear hadn't primarily been that she would find Marie objectionable on account of her race since that prejudice had been more ingrained in her parents generation than hers. His fear had instead been that his great great grandmother, as self-proclaimed guardian of the old, aristocratic traditions, might object to their relationship because the Trinhs were restaurateurs with no history of pedigree, education or money behind them.

In Cora's world (the 1920s, where her mind was half the time), heirs had married heiresses, families had coordinated their fortunes and everyone had kept an eye on everyone else; these were rules of decorum that had lasted for her long after the Claytons had gone bust in the great Crash of '29. The fact that she had taken Joseph aside and explained her concerns to him had done nothing to soothe his embarrassment, although he had finally convinced her that, being naturalized citizens with a successful restaurant, the Trinhs were firmly in the middling classes. She had also estimated that said restaurant, with no other inheritors besides Marie, would most likely pass into Clayton hands in the fullness of time.

No one had dared explain to her the differences between modern teenage dating and the genteel courtships of her youth.

"I don't think she reacted that oddly. Sure, she was so out of date that you had to explain that I meant 'French Indochina' when I said that my parents came from Vietnam and she _did _seem a bit too fascinated with my families origins and, alright, it was weird hearing someone actually use the word 'courting' without trying to be funny. However, it was kind of nice to speak French with someone in this town after all the time my parents invested in me learning it." Marie knew that while it had been terrifying for Joseph, having to put up with his relatives dissection of his relationship and fearing disapproval, she herself had enjoyed a chance to see if the old stereotypes were true. When it had become clear to Marie that the elderly woman was not about to spew racial epitaphs at her but was, indeed, fascinated as to her families background, Marie had made it a point to 'ham it up' in telling their story.

To an entranced Cora Clayton, Marie had described her parents lives before emigration as a subsistence existence in a village high up in the fog-choked mountain passes. She had woven scenes of her people worshiping strange, heathen gods far from the civilized lands of the Buddha and partaking in ghastly rituals to ensure harvests of rice from narrow mountainside terraces. She told the old woman that her parents had tired of such a life and had dreamed of something more, something in the wider world glimpsed in third-hand magazines and radio broadcasts.

After receiving a dispensation from their village shaman to leave (but promising to sent back remittances), they had made their way to Hanoi and then to Boston and finally to Glaston where, having never truly given up the more religious and symbolic aspects of their heathenish past, they nevertheless had made good names for themselves in the community. Marie had made sure that her prose had been both lurid and exotic so as to fully entrance a child of the Age of Empire as well as making proper use of tone, whether enraptured, casual or deathly serious, to emphasize mood. The end result was to make it sound as if her culture wasn't just some rural outlet of modern Vietnam or Laos, but as if it was truly unlike any other in the world.

That was an opinion that Joseph was also rapidly adopting.

They ate in relative silence for a while, the bustle of the lunch crowd beginning to die down as people left, many of them stopping to talk to Mr. Trinh at the till, expressing their concern over what had happened with the window. They were just about half done when Joseph began another conversation. "So, did you know that there's a 'Heritage Day' coming up at school in a few weeks?"

"Yeah, and?" Deep down in her gut, Marie was beginning to get a slightly worried feeling from the direction this conversation was going. This pretty much happened whenever the subject of her parent's past came up but, like so many times before, she could probably bluff her way through it.

"I thought that, maybe, we could do something for it. I was thinking about dredging up something from Normandy because I didn't want to clog up the schedule with another variation of British regional culture." It sounded perfectly innocent, but Marie knew that this was a potentially tricky situation that might require misdirection, a convincing excuse and possible outright lying.

She hated lying to Joseph.

"Alright then. You can do that, I'll do the Vietnamese thing and we'll knock 'em all dead." She answered with an enthusiasm that she hoped had betrayed nothing of her growing unease with the conversation. This seemed to provoke nothing but a non-committal murmur of agreement and thus, thinking that that was over with, she began eating again.

However, that was _not _the end of it.

"By Vietnamese, do you mean the standard culture from around Hanoi... or the culture from your parent's home village?" Joseph asked, seemingly as if only for the purpose of clarification. There was much more behind it though, and whether it was just ingrained paranoia or any real danger of exposure, Marie knew that this was entering onto some very tenuous and potentially very _dangerous _ground. Still, the subject had to be breached.

"Aren't they pretty much the same? I mean, sure, it was pretty rural back there, but whether village or city, we were all Viet: same language, same culture, same blood, same... pretty much everything, when you think about it." As denials went, this one wasn't half bad: sincere enough to be taken seriously and with enough internal logic that it wouldn't fall apart immediately in the face of the mildly educated mind.

On this subject, however, Joseph had become rather more than merely mildly educated. He had observed things for a long time: a lot of little things and one or two big things for the most part. And he, after long deliberation and study, had discovered that some of those things just didn't match up.

"You know, there was a time when I could believe that. But... there are just too many deviations to discount." Joesph stopped eating all together, putting down his fork and looking his girlfriend straight in the eyes before closing and opening them again, as if to rally his thoughts. "The food, for one thing, isn't like any kind of Vietnamese food I've read about. Yes, you have the side dishes but that's about it for similarity. Second, your parent's tattoos. Again, unlike any other group in Southeast Asia; the closest matches I could find were incised lines on bronze figurines from over two _thousand _years ago."

He stopped again. "And then there's the language you guys speak. I'm fairly sure it's in the Mon-Khmer group, but I've been doing some research and... honestly, I've seen words on this menu that I've never been able to find in any other source. And I'm not the only one who's noticed these things." Joesph saw panic flash across Marie's eyes, though she tried to hide it. "Most people don't pay attention and honestly don't care, and the ones who _do _notice just assume that you guys are either Hmong or some little minority that no-one's ever heard of... but even that doesn't match very well either. It's like you said, you're Viet... but what about all this other stuff?"

It was then that Marie could have ended it all: the doubts, the questions, the lingering curiosity... as well as twenty one centuries of secrecy, tradition and very likely her relationship with this young man. In the end, she decided to dodge again. "What can I say? We were _very _rural." When Joesph just got this frustrated look on his face, Marie sighed, reached across the table and enveloped one of his hands with hers. "Look, I'll try and dredge something up if I can, but I can't promise anything, okay?"

Joseph mulled on this lack of answers, but as the moment dragged on, his resistance wore down. "Alright. If you don't want to talk about your culture, that's alright; lots of people come to America to get away from stuff. But I still am sorta curious." Then he changed the subject. "Anyway, after we eat, we should begin studying for our tests. Do you want to go over the English or the Algebra first?"

"We should do the Math first, then we can cool off with the Shakespeare. But we better not let the food get cold, what with how the sauce gets if allowed to sit for too long." Marie began eating again and, after a few beats, Joseph resumed as well.

They stayed at that table for many hours, going over and revising their knowledge of maths and literature. However, already Marie wondered if there was something she could reveal, _something_ that she could show about her parent's culture that would not threaten expose them and, as the old saying went among her tribe, '_get them cut in half and buried in two graves'_.

**Later that night, The Trinh's upstairs apartment**

To Marie's relief, her parents reaction to her plan wasn't anger. On the other hand, fear and worry could be almost as painful.

"_I know how you feel about the Clayton boy. He's well-liked, intelligent and his parents are our insurance agents_." Thanh Thi Trinh began, speaking in her families particular dialect of Viet as she, Marie and Thuch Van sat around their dining room table. "_But I ask this of you: is Joesph and his interest in this celebration worth the risk of exposure and, may I add, possible death when this town realizes who we are, when they realize __what_ _we are?_" Thanh Thi had always been the more reserved, more cautious and, frankly, more paranoid spouse in this family when it came to their safety. Where her husband was the face of the restaurant, she ran the kitchen with an eye on the back door and all of their cooks. While Thuch made friendly at social gatherings, Thanh kept track of all possible escape routes and who was and wasn't looking at them. She kept track of any news about gangs and hate-group activity in the area, and about any other strange things.

The sort of things that might lure out the kind of people who hunted their people.

But Marie had prepared for this. "_Mother, I know the risks that revealing the secrets of our people would bring. However, I am counting on two circumstances to make sure that only the most benign and harmless information is portrayed._" She rallied herself, knowing that the way she handled this could make the difference on how she presented herself to nearly everyone, especially Joseph . "_First, I must inform both of you that there are some people in this town, including my boyfriend, that realize that we are not quite from the mainstream culture of modern Vietnam._" At this, both Thanh and Thuch got even more worried but they weren't shocked, seeing as any bumpkin with an Internet connection could find that tribal tattooing wasn't really the rage in downtown Hanoi. "_The good news is that while these people realize that we belong to a distinct subgroup, they often deduce that we are either rural Hmong or some other obscure ethnic group. In other words, they know nothing about who our people are and, like the rest of the town, they honestly do not care._"

"_What about the nature of our traditons, Marie? What would you do, what rite of our people would be performed on that stage that would not end up with half the town vomiting and the other half trying to hang us_?" Her father had been relatively quiet in this conversation, but he knew that the rituals of his village had, during various times in history, left such a bad impression upon outsiders that they had responded in force to try to stamp them out.

Here, Marie began grasping the thick, heavy and old scrapbook that lay closed upon the table before her. It had been entrusted to them by their village and, by the blessings of the Gods and their Instrument, they had kept it safe and hidden for more than twenty years. "_Father, it is not as if I wish to set up an alter on the stage, recite the incantations of the harvest rites and slice something open; frankly, I would have no idea how. However, I believe that there is a ritual that is benign, unusual and, even according to the author of this book, beautiful enough to make people forget it's oddity_." She opened the book, filled with sepia photographs and notes written in French on yellowed paper, to the page she had bookmarked. "_I want to do the Stork Dance_."

Her parents were quiet for a minute. Admittedly, this was probably the least unusual rite of their people and it did seem to have a calming effect on its audiences. However, it took weeks of intensive training in order to do it right, the costuming and specific actions depended on whether the dancer was a man or woman and the phonograph with the instrumental music and vocals, only having been recorded once before, was on the other side of the planet. It was a tall order to pull off for anyone. "_You do realize that practicing for the dance requires grueling routine, so much so that it might effect your __school work_?" Asked her mother, wondering if her daughter was truly sincere.

"I know that. I'll just have to sacrifice my time with Joesph, a sacrifice that I'm sure he'd understand." Marie responded in English this time, the plans for her act becoming clearer. "However, I'll need some help in creating the proper costuming and... I know that shipping items from the Old Country is like trying to smuggle Plutonium but if you could convince the shamans to release that phonograph for a month or two, I would be eternally grateful to all of them, and to you."

Her parents wondered, not for the first time, if Marie truly comprehended what could be asked of that gratitude in the years to come. She had the opportunity to live a life completely detached from the paranoia, the fear and the constant danger that followed her people. Would she give that chance away simply for the sake of a boy?

Whatever choice she made, however, was hers to make.

In the end, they acquiesced... but not without informing their daughter of what their home village could ask of her in exchange for the items she wished. It might be years until it was asked but one day, a representative of their village would approach her and request a repayment, be it in money, information or something else.

It was that "something else" that truly worried Thuch and Thanh.


	2. Heritage and Humilitation

Memories of Leng  
>Chapter 2<p>

Disclaimer: As before, i do not own anything. The Cthulhu Mythos belongs to Howard Philip Lovecraft, August Derleth and others among that Revered Circle. Delta Green belongs to Pagan Publishing.

Synopsis: The Stork Dance is performed, the audience becomes enraptured... and shadows move within shadows. Meanwhile, a break in the case develops.

**Glaston High School Auditorium, Glaston, upper Worcester Co., Massachusetts **  
><strong>November 17th, 2007<strong>

Joseph Clayton watched from his seat on the center aisle as Pete Tallier finished his act. The young man had performed a folk-dance from his ancestral Quebec, a homeland his family had left more than a century ago for jobs in the New England furniture industry. He himself had finished his act more than an hour ago, having opted for a simple folk dance and traditional Norman costume with a top hat. Of course, using a hat-rack instead of a dancing partner had been a bit... _unusual_; with Marie being so involved in her own routine, he had had to make do with what he could get.

But now, as Joseph finished clapping in approval of the previous act, he realized that his girlfriend was due to come on. What would actually happen was a complete mystery to Joseph; Marie had kept a tight lid on her act by practicing at home and while she had spent much less time with him than normal, she had stressed how important this was for her. So, respecting her wishes, he'd kept his distance and wished her luck. Now, with his parents sitting beside him, the Trinhs just across the aisle and after weeks of mystery, he was finally about to discover what the big secret was.

The male student in charge of the event came forward after Tallier left the stage, dressed in traditional Greek costume. "Next up is Marie Trinh, who will be performing a traditional 'journey rite in two parts' from the Annamite Mountains of Vietnam and Laos. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you 'The Stork Dance'!" He exited downstage right as the lights dimmed even further than they had, the only illumination the bright center of the spotlight focused on the place he had been. Slowly, almost dramatically, the spotlight edged back towards the rear wall until it revealed a lone figure wrapped in a white cloak, face obscured by something.

Utter silence pervaded the auditorium before the sound system gave off the squeal of a needle scratching on a record and the sounds of soft, high flutes began wafting upon the air. It was then that the figure started walking forward on bare feet, segmented anklets of carved jade just visible below the hem of the long, black skirt while the white cloak draped over the arms and... it almost looked like some sort of hat or strange mask was concealing the figure's head. Suddenly, pipes of a lower pitch, possibly oboes, started playing a mournful tune and the figure stopped suddenly, lifting it's head to face the crowd.

A spoonbill... with a black beak. So that was what that big fuss with the paper-mache was about.

The dance was in two parts. The first was a mournful, melancholy arrangement that supposedly was intended for farewell ceremonies. Zithers, oboes, various other instruments of the right mood and the creaky, brittle, almost sad songs of old women set the tone for the dance, a carefully choreographed routine that either imitated the intricate placement of a wading birds steps or imitated the slow soaring of those same birds. This was the Song of Departure. The second part, that of Arrival, was more...upbeat in its cadence. After the record was flipped, the plucking of lutes and brighter zithers, the delicate clanging of some sort of bells, jollier wind instruments and the celebratory singing of young women replaced the melancholy mood of earlier. The dancers steps also changed, with sudden, sprightly movements becoming the norm as imitations of courtship displays and feeding were performed.

Throughout the dance, the audience had been enraptured by what was happening onstage. While Joseph was certainly enjoying his girlfriends act, he was not so enraptured that he failed to notice that several very strange things were happening in the darkened theater. The first change he noticed was the background odor. Slowly, over the course of the act, the smell in the theater had changed from the dry, dusty smell of upholstery and the hot metal of lighting equipment to... well, there was river mud, water thick with life, plants growing in the sun and warm wind. It wasn't a _bad_ smell, but there was no real way that it could be coming from anywhere in the building.

Other strange things were... shapes in the darkness. During the first part of the dance Joseph could have sworn that he glimpsed shadowy shapes moving in the aisle beside him, shapes that almost looked like... wading birds. During the second act, he could almost imagine that the silvery shapes of gliding birds were being outlined by the residual glare from the spotlight, though that could easily be passed off as wafting dust.

Except that there wasn't that much dust in the theater.

Thirdly, and much less unusually, an elderly man with thinning, almost white curly hair, wire rim spectacles and a short beard was watching the performance with interest, almost... studying it. Joseph had never seen him in the town before, so who was he and why was he here?

And had he or anyone else seen the apparitions?

When the dance was done and Marie (who had revealed herself at the end of the dance by taking off her headdress and taking a bow) had left the stage, Joseph kept thinking on that thought during the remaining acts. The smell had faded and gone, the shadows and shapes were no longer there but the mere hint of their possibility shook him. He was a person of science, of logic, of well-produced nature documentaries; in the real world, things like this did not happen outside the heads of crazy people.

However... the very thought of the ghostly shapes thrilled Joseph, filled him with fantastic wonders and terrors not felt since he was a boy of five. And, thought the young man, it did not truly matter if it _was_ wonderful or terrible, or if Marie could control or even knew about this sort of stuff. All that truly mattered was that... well, at the level of base wonderment, the entire experience was remarkably exciting.

Sinister? Maybe. Normal? Not in the least. But very definitely exciting.

But... maybe it would be best not to mention it until Marie brought it up.

**Later**

After the show, as students were putting away their costumes and props and donning their late-autumn outerwear, Joseph approached his girlfriend who, with dress, cloak and headpiece in a garment bag, was heading out the door after her parents. "Hey, Marie... about what you did on stage tonight?"

"Yes?" Questioned Marie as she turned towards Joseph. As a courtesy, he would never mention it but he could tell that something was weighing on her mind. The impression that she was on the very edge of flight made it seem that, perhaps, she was aware that strange things had happened.

Strange things... but not necessarily _bad_ things.

"I just have to say that you really hit a crowd pleaser tonight. I don't think any of the other acts got as much applause as yours did." With that, Joseph saw Marie's face lighten from the mask of apprehension that had been there into a gratified smile.

"Thanks. You wouldn't believe how grueling the practicing was and then the costume and making all those fake pendants and charms... after all that, I was hoping it would get a good reception." With that, she turned back and began walking out into the early night air, over to the parking space where her parents had parked their combination commercial van and personal conveyance.

Joseph had actively resisted losing himself in the weirdness that had struck him in the auditorium. However, he could never resist losing himself in his girlfriends smile.

Perhaps because one was familiar and one was a bit... _odd_.

Running to catch up with Marie, he wanted to ask his girlfriend something. "On a different subject, I was wondering if you were doing anything tonight. Maybe we could catch a movie, go bowling, something like that."

"I'd like to but I really can't." They were almost at the Trinhs van when Marie leaned in close to Joseph to whisper conspiratorially. "Dad got a call from the cops when the Polish guy was on. They arrested someone vandalizing the front of the shop, and we'll probably be busy all night with statements, forms, the insurance guys and all the other police stuff."

Though he was disappointed, Joseph Clayton knew that something like this couldn't be delayed. "Alright, maybe I'll see you tomorrow. Goodnight." After getting an answer back in the form of a goodnight kiss (which still made him blush despite himself), he watched Marie depart toward her parents vehicle. The question came back to him, after all these weeks, of who in this town could be angry or stupid enough to be implicated in the vandalism spree that had plagued the Leng Trinh restaurant.

**At Roughly the Same time, Glaston Police Station**

As Constance Blake entered the interview room, she reflected on the fact that it had to have been a pretty slow couple of weeks when they pulled the Chief of Police out of her office for a break in a vandalism case. On the other hand, she'd finished the normal paperwork an hour before and had been flipping through a fishing catalog with the squawk-box on beside her when Lt. Anderson had come in. He'd told her that they'd arrested some punk kid trying to bust up the Trinh's restaurant, the culmination in a series of events that had been the height of municipal intrigue for weeks. As she got a look at the culprit, she was a little surprised.

"Punk kid" indeed.

As she sat down across from suspect, Chief Blake tapped the case file, a few reports inside a paper folder, against the table. "You know," she began dryly, "we get quite a few idiots through here: gang members, druggies, people who've taken offense one to many times. We just haven't ever got one who was this high up in the High School Math Club." She dropped the file in front of Than Quang Due, a young man who, besides having a Sino-typical naming structure, was short, thin, bespectacled and looked amazingly like a 12-year old for someone who was actually 15. He and his parents had moved here the the summer and had set up a jewelery shop a few blocks over from _Leng Trinh_. Up until this, Due had never been anything but a model student, a respectful son and a bright (if somewhat timid) young man. "So, why'd you do it?"

Due looked at the middle aged woman with a gaze that mixed deference with surprise in the face of seeming insanity. "Because no one else would! Because this town has tolerated... _people_ like that for so long.". There was a touch of bitterness in his voice but also surprise. Were these people so stupid that they didn't recognize a threat in their very midst?

"Look, I don't know what's going on, but I know that it stops right now." Constance stood up and, even at 5'1", the sight of her leaning over the suspect should have been intimidating to the boy. But then Blake began asking almost rhetorical questions "What is this about anyway? You ask out their daughter and get refused? Well, if that is it, this was between you, her and the Clayton boy. No need to get mad at her parents." It was then that another idea came to the Chief of Police. "Or is this because they're Hmong?"

At this, Due's face carried a look of utter incomprehension.

"Look, I realize that there's some bad blood carried over from the War. But you have to realize something too: this is America, the land of opportunity, of freedom. This is the land where people should be able to get away from the madness, where every little feud and squabble is best left back in the old country. Now, your parents and the Trinhs are going to be here soon and if you're smart, you _will _apologize; Thuc Van and Thanh Thi are good people, they're liked in the community and as sure as God made little green apples, they didn't deserve any of this."

It was then that realization dawned on Due. The people who had informed him and sent him on this mission had mandated secrecy... but apparently he and they weren't the only ones good at keeping secrets.

With a look that held a touch of arrogance, a smidgen of fascinated bewilderment and, especially in his grin, the hint that he was not totally mentally hinged, Due asked a question that infuriated Constance Blake. "You have _no_ _idea _what they are, do you?"


	3. The Village of Mist

**Memories of Leng**  
>Chapter 3<p>

Disclaimer: I still don't own anything. The ideas are all from established Mythos themes and works... though, maybe a little jiggling has been done for flavour.

Synopsis: Years Later, a young man travels to a far off land in search of knowledge. He finds it... but he also finds someone from his past.

* * *

><p>"<em>Once, mankind accepted a simple truth: that they were not alone in this universe."<em>

-Anthony Hopkins as Odin, _Thor _(2011).

* * *

><p><strong>Hanoi, Socialist Republic of Vietnam<strong>  
><strong>June 24, 2011.<strong>

"Hey, we're here. Get up if you don't want to wake up in Hue!"

Joseph Clayton was shaken awake by the hand of one of his classmates on his shoulder. He was sitting in the back of a taxi van... the only one left sitting, actually, as the others had already disembarked to enter the government office they were parked in front of.

Which probably meant that he was left to pay the fare.

After he payed (as seemed to be his lot on this trip), he followed his classmates and his professor into the government office where they hoped to finally receive their travel permits. He hadn't gotten much of sleep on the plane; a mixture of excitement in the face of overseas travel and sheer jet-lag had conspired to leave him weary and light headed until he got a few hours sleep, which the taxi ride had partially afforded him.

And in that sleep...

The dream had come as a stark, clear memory. When Marie had said that she wasn't going to join him at the Miskatonic campus in Arkham for what would be their first year of university, he had been devastated. His first questions, rushed and frantic, had been about the cause of such a change. She certainly had the SAT score to qualify and student debt could be handled with relative ease. Had she decided to forgo post-secondary to concentrate on her stake in the restaurant? Had financial problems struck and prevented admissions from being paid?

Was it something about _him_?

Her answers, far more controlled than his frenzied speculation, had all been in the negative. Her SAT scores were good, student loans were still open and she still intended to go for a degree in Biology at Miskatonic. It was just... after she'd gotten that phonograph from her parents' home village, the repayment had been a promise to come and spend a year back in the "Old Country" as soon as she could. It would only be for a year and then she would return, ready for university and all accompaniments.

That had been very nearly one year before. She had promised him that she would be coming back in the summer of 2011... but after she had arrived in Vietnam, all contact had stopped cold. Her parents, when asked about her condition, always responded with affirmations that she would return and that she was fine... but as winter wore onto spring, subtle hints of doubt and worry had crept into their voices. Had they even been receiving any news from their daughter and if not, then why not? Had something gone terribly wrong?

As it happened, more baffling events awaited inside.

"_What do you mean, __**restricted**_?" Joseph asked the Communist Party bureaucrat sitting across the desk from him. Of course, due to the facts that first, said bureaucrat was a government employee and second, they were not alone in the room, Joseph had been careful not to sound too brunt in his tone. A _trung si_or Sergeant, wearing the forest green uniform of the Vietnam Border Defence Force (VPA), stood by the door of the office, both watching and guarding.

Relieved at being able to shed his stilted English after Joseph exhibited a decent grasp of the Vietnamese language, the bureaucrat put forth what he knew of the situation. "_Civilian access is almost completely denied inside the area you requested. To be honest, that section of the border has been troublesome ever since the war. We get reports of smugglers, poachers, bandits, H'mong insurgents... every type of violent counter-revolutionary you can think of, this region seems to have it. The local Bru farmers aren't much help, but they generally don't bother others and seem to accept the military presence we keep there." _The bureaucrat shifted his gaze from Joseph to Professor Neville Andover, the leader of this particular expedition. "I'm sorry, but there's nothing that can be done without high level authorization."

As a response to this, Neville Andover did not get upset. He did not resign himself to failure. He did not even try to ask if there was any other avenue of entry or way to access the information he needed. He just donned an odd, amused smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling behind his wire rim glasses. "I assume that General Vo is still the Secretary for the Border Forces?" He asked, almost distractedly. When the official answered yes, Professor Andover reached into the inside of his light cotton jacket and pulled out a small, metal case. From this case, he removed a single paper card of purest black, embossed with an emerald green "Delta" symbol and a capital "Y" of gold in the center of that hollow triangle. "I have been in contact with Comrade Vo for the last six months, planning this expedition as an act of cooperation between our two governments and as a boon for my University. He knows that card; show it or describe it to him... you _may_want to run it by General Tran as well. Either way, they will give you the answer you need."

As the bureaucrat took the card and then as the Border Defense sergeant took it from him and headed out of the room, Joesph wondered about his professor and the oddities that surrounded him. The first time he had ever seen the Professor, it had been in his High School Auditorium as Marie had performed the Stork Dance... and Joseph had noticed strange things. In their senior year of High School, both he and Marie had received reference letters to Miskatonic University in Arkham, a town in Essex county. When he had arrived at Miskatonic (without Marie), he had been shocked that the professor for his Cultural Anthropology class was not only the one who had given him his reference but was also the man who had he had seen three years before.

And then there were his classmates, three of whom had also come on this expedition. Many of them had received similar letters from Prof. Andover and most of those, though not relaying specifics, had said that they had found the circumstances equally strange. Two who had gotten references were on this very trip with them. The first was Tracy Williams from the farm country of Northwest Virginia, a girl with blond hair quite a few shades lighter than Josephs own brassy brown and the class Nippon-Nut, being both obsessed with Anime and Manga as well as being Japanese-proficient. The second was Albert Noyes, a young man who has part white, part black and a little Algonquin-Indian from a small hamlet in southern Vermont. His specialties were technology, math and Mandarin Chinese. The third member of retinue was a young man named Malone who... frankly, was a mystery to the entire class. However, he had volunteered for this trip and his grades had been excellent so his place on the roster had been assured.

But there was still a nagging question at the back of his mind: _why_? Why had they received offers to go to an obscure if admittedly exceptional regional university when the big names had all passed them over? Why had they been gathered from all across the United States by a single professor? And why, it seemed, did it feel like there was such a big connection between the missing member of Dr. Andovers "collection" and the reason behind this expedition?

Why did it feel as if Marie was somehow connected to this?

Eventually, the sergeant came back and informed the bureaucrat of General Vo's express permission for the Professor and his students to enter the exclusion zone as well as General Tran's confirmation, before handing the card back to Neville Andover. Joseph knew that academics could sometimes have friends in high and unusual places, but counting on ... no, _expecting_ the approval of not just one, but _two _ranking Generals in a non-allied nation? This seemed crazy, certifiably insane even.

But then, so did spectral storks and spoonbills.

**Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam**  
><strong>June 29, 2011<strong>

Despite the calm look on the professors face, something about the current situation made Joseph Clayton distinctly ill at ease.

They had spent the last two days trudging up into the Annamite mountains after leaving the fertile coastal plain. At the last village with road access, they had ditched their vehicles and backpacked up the ridges and trails, counting on a guide from the local Bru people to lead them to... whatever Prof. Andover was looking for. The fact that the guide was now legging it quite quickly back down the misty path told Joseph that something had either gone incredibly wrong or incredibly right.

Now, Neville Andover was chanting, seemingly trying to communicate with something deep in the thick underbrush on either side of the worn, overgrown gully that had been called a trail. The language was almost intellig ible to Joseph, being a form of Mon-Khmer linked to the classical Vietnamese he had studied, perhaps with a few hints of Muong intermixed. However, the syntax and grammer were archaic to say the least. From some of the words used it even seemed to be achingly familiar, almost as if...

With a sudden realization of shock and the smell of grilled pork and Bac Bon Dzhow a memory in his nostrils, Joseph realized where he had encountered this form of Vietic before.

But the shocks were not over.

Spun around by Albert Noyes to see something, Joseph gazed upward to see a human figure standing upon the high bank, glancing down at them with hard, measuring eyes. Undoubtedly masculine, the figure was of a man of slightly darker skin than the farmers of the coast (though the features were similar) and of greater height than either them or the native Bru. Clothed only in a white cotton kilt with geometric designs in black and a leather girdle, this man carried a white flatbow decorated with bands of green, blue and red while a bronze dagger rested at his hip. His head was shaved of all hair, and black designs were tattooed from the crown of the scalp to the jawline, with more tattoos covering his arms, chest and lower legs.

The fact that an arrow was nocked in the string of his bow put the four young people on edge, with Malone and Joesph himself tightening the grips on the hilts of their machetes in anticipation of a hopeless fight. More men in similar dress and tattoos, some with bronze slashing swords, some with bronze-headed spears and others with flatbows, appeared out of the forest on either side of them. Now that Joseph could get a better look at them in the dim light filtering down through the forest canopy and the mist, their arm tattoos began looking very similar to those borne by Marie's parents while those on their faces, while different in design, were still similar in form.

All the while, Prof. Andover kept up the low chanting, of which Joseph could pick out individual words: "friend", "gods", "village", "priest", "comrade" and at least one invocation of Ho Chi Minh among them. To this, these strange men seemed to confer with each other though glances and nods before took one took a short, bamboo tube from his girdle, put one end to his mouth, took a deep breath and blew.

As the silvery-blue powder erupted from the tube, settled on the heads of the trekking academics and they each lost consciousness in turn, Joseph wondered if this could get any worse.

**Meanwhile, Spoonbill Village**

Tsan Pho Dao had been the Chief Priest of this village for many years, ever since the death of his father in the closing days of the American War. In that span of years, he had seen many futures and advised his people based on those futures. He had called down both ruin and plenty by invoking the power of the gods of his people. He alone, in a feat outside even the power of the hereditary village chiefs, had communicated with the Instrument of their gods, a being possessed of both boundless knowledge and an absolutely rotten temper. He also, most importantly, had an absolutely perfect memory of his entire life... and that of his father, and his father before him.

To be perfectly honest, he held a tremendous amount of power within this village. The ancestor shrines belonged to families while the hunters had their own little shrines up the mountain where midnight rituals were performed to gather poison for the tips of arrows and darts. But those rituals needed to be performed by the minor priests under _his_ command. This temple was the spiritual center of his people for most of the year and the temple with it's darkened wood walls lit only by feeble braziers whose light was twisted by the smoke of rare and powerful incenses, with it's figurines of gods and demons carved from nephrite and jadeite brought from deep below the earth... was _his_ domain. His and no one else'. He divined the future when possible, he performed the rites and as a result, it was _he_ who had taken countless lives in sacrifice over the course of his adulthood: chickens, pigs, goats, buffalo... _people_.

As he sat at a low table in his private sanctuary, trying to divine some course for a question that had faced him for most of a year, he noticed something. One of the golden discs he used for divination, a coin looted from a Chinese caravan many centuries ago, stood up on its rim and began to roll. Following the curve of failing momentum, the coin finally came to rest at a specific point on the table, a place that held indication of the future.

Visitors... and not the "ketchup" kind of visitors.

**Several Hours Later, Close to the Laos Border**

The answer to Joseph Clayton's earlier question was a definite _yes_. When he had awoken, he had found his wrists and ankles bound, the bindings looped over a pole carried by two men with him and the other students suspended like deer carcasses. The Professor, on the other hand, had not been bound, but had found transport by sitting in a large basket suspended from one of the poles by a cord, carried by a pair of men. They had been going downhill from the crest of a ridge and were now leaving the forest, coming onto a road. First, they passed under a wooden gate where roosting spoonbills had been carved into the posts and a sun flanked by two dragons had been carved into the beams above the road.

Then Joseph saw where they were headed. A village of perhaps thirty houses was visible in the valley bottom while narrow terraces had been cut into the hills above, green with growing rice. The view quickly vanished as the men began heading into the village itself but sight was soon replaced with sound. The quiet of the forest was supplanted by the cacophony of a hundred sounds: chickens and pigs grunted and clucked as the animals rooted below the houses and around the garbage heaps while odd-looking reddish dogs, lazing in the sun on the porches of the outermost houses, whined in surprise at the new arrivals. The sounds of tools and primitive machinery clunked melodiously. The sounds of people also were audible: talking, laughing, shouting and even a few low notes of women's work songs were possible for Joseph to pick out of the general buzz... a buzz which also included Albert trying to reason with their captors and Tracy displaying an unusually foul mouth toward same.

Soon, people began to notice the men bringing in captives and a few even began to gather along the path as they entered the village, joining their dogs (or Dholes, as they were now identifiable as) who had come to sniff. It was mostly men, older boys and children who came out to watch while the women and the elderly usually went no further than windows and the porches of the stilt-houses that lined the road. Here, even hanging upside down, Joseph could notice a few things about the dress and appearance of the people

Frankly... it was a bit odd.

From what he knew, the Vietnamese national costume (in it's modern form) placed a heavy emphasis on trousers, an item of clothing that he noticed was rather conspicuously absent here. Everyone here seemed to be wearing variations on one basic outfit in either brown or black: knee-length cotton kilts, short-sleeved cotton jackets (mostly with their front fastenings closed) and either rough-woven conical hats or simple cloths tied over their heads. The men's hair appeared to be cut short to the point where one could vaguely make out the tattoos on their scalp while children varied between the same shortness for boys and a single, long braid for the girls.

Eventually they arrived in a great or square before what appeared to be the temple: a ponderous structure of wood and brick perched upon massive stone foundations, it's sloping roofs flaring outward as if to shroud the surrounding houses from the scrutiny of the heavens. Around them, a crowd had gathered on all sides, an air of excitement buzzing in the air. Men exited the house across the square from the temple entrance and despite the calm demeanour of Professor Andover, words began filtering through to Joseph that began sounding more and more disturbing; words like "kill", "sacrifice" and "ritual". But another word came, one that sent darker imaginings and images rambling through his sensation-saturated mind.

The word "eat".

"_WAIT! STOP!_"

Joseph knew _those _words as well... as well as _that voice_!

Out of the crowd rushed a figure dressed much like the others: brown kilt and jacket, the latter partially open to reveal a _yem _undergarment and with a straw hat on her head. As Joseph finally began taking in other details, he noticed the tattooed lines and whimsical designs on her lower legs and arms and on her face, lines and vaguely triangular patterns that almost resembled the features of an orangutan.

Her face... behind all the tattooing, the face of this woman was still as unmistakable to Joseph as the first day they had met in Kindergarten. To this sudden recognition, the young man could only exclaim his surprise as a soothingly familiar name.

"_Marie?_"


	4. Revelations and Confessions

**Memories of Leng  
><strong>Chapter 4

Disclaimer: Don't own anything. The Mythos, while being largely public domain, was still the property of Lovecraft, Howard, Derleth and sundries.

Summary: Lives are spared and the truth finally comes out. But one truth will eventually become many.

**Spoonbill Village, Northernmost Quang Bin Province, SRV**  
><strong>June 29, 2011<strong>

As the two young adults stared at each other, nothing but shock registered in either of their brains. Not the stares of the villagers nor of Joseph's classmates affected them in their surprise. For Joseph, the shock was mixed with relief at finding his girlfriend safe, concern about his own impending fate as the main course and a strange confusion about what the heck was going on. For Marie, it was the sheer shock of actually seeing her boyfriend here and her puzzlement at the reason why that added to her numb bewilderment, not to mention the fear for his life at what might happen next.

As the shock broke, she knew that she had to act. And since the village chief was here...

"_You cannot sacrifice this man! His family are allies are of my parents, his parents are involved in our business. If anything happens to him, calamity will come upon us all!" _Demanding such things of the chieftain might have been rude, presumptuous and even insulting, but everything she said was the truth. If Joseph died, things would go down the toilet _very _quickly.

Before the men could answer back, the crashing of a great bronze gong echoed over the crowd and all heads turned towards the source of the cacophony, the temple. Coming down the steps was a red lacquered palanquin with red curtains. Four men in deeply-hooded red robes supported the wooden structure, it's bracing poles upon their shoulders. As they reached the courtyard proper, one of the warriors who had exited the large house went up to the palanquin, distinguished from the others by leather shoes on his feet, a broad circlet of gold around his black head-wrap and a single pheasant tail feather standing erect at the forefront of this headdress. Joseph could distinguish some sort of conversation happening, the words too quiet to make out. For several tense seconds he, Marie, his classmates and his professor waited for what would happen.

What happened was that from this man, the villages hereditary chief, the order was given for them to be spared... for now. Another order was given to separate them and hold them in isolation until a final decision could be made.

As Joseph was carried away into a side street, he could almost glimpse Marie following the palanquin into the Temple, including his Professor, still sitting in his basket.

Several Hours Later

Joseph could never fully recall all of the things that he had pondered in those hours, sitting with his hands and feet bound, alone in that dark storehouse, smelling of rice and preserved vegetables. He had found Marie and as he had suspected for a number of years, she apparently belonged to a semi-unique culture of Vietic speakers in her purported homeland of the Annamite Range. What came as a surprise was that they apparently, if the few bits of coherent speech he had heard were any indication, practiced some sort of ritualized homicide and may well be inclined toward the consumption of "long pork"... and at the moment, that could include _him_.

Eventually the door opened and soft, yellow light flooded the room, illuminating bags of rice and strings of hanging vegetables. In the doorway was Marie, carrying a paper covered lantern in one hand, a bronze bowl in the other and now hat-less. As he had briefly noticed earlier, the muscles on her limbs now had a definition to them that hadn't existed back in Glaston, her frame slightly more lean than the apprentice cook that he remembered. She was dressed just as she had been before, was still tattooed everywhere he could see and, as she she came over to where he was sitting, the light in the lantern seemed more like... _fireflies _than any kind of flame.

"So... nice place you have here." He hoped that starting slow could take some of the edge off the dangerous situation in which he now faced himself.

"Yeah... it is nice, I guess." Marie put the bowl (now seen to be carrying water) and the lantern on the ground beside him and knelt to untie his bonds. "I'm sorry that you got dragged into this. When I borrowed that record... I had no idea that..." She closed her eyes and sighed in a way that, to Joseph, made the tattoos on her face dance almost... _alluringly_. "There's a lot that I just couldn't tell you when we were younger. My people are used to hiding... maybe _too_used to it by now. I want to tell you so much, but I... I don't know where to begin."

"Then start from the beginning. That always seems to be how it's done in the movies." Rubbing his wrists and ankles to get the circulation back, Joseph wondered just what he was going to hear.

What he heard was _everything_about her people, the stories she had enraptured Cora with plus a whole lot of other stuff, fantastic and gruesome in equal measure. The human sacrifice, the ritual cannibalism, the intermittent persecution by Chinese, Champa, Viet and French over the last two thousand years... nothing was left out. As he sipped water from the bowl, she described how her peoples ancestors had been Au Lac refugees from the Red River Valley, driven south into the mountains by the invading Qin Chinese. On the edge of total starvation, they had been saved when a spirit animal, a black water buffalo cow with a seemingly endless number of calves trailing behind, had emerged from the highland jungle at the chanting of animist shamans travelling with the group.

Behind those spectral buffalo had emerged their wonder and salvation: men in red robes with the legs of goats, monks from a far, high land called Leng. These strange people, who called themselves _Shugoran_, had taught this diverse group of farmers, mountain peoples, priests, urbanites and servants many useful magics: how to grow up to twelve crops of rice per year, how to draw water and metal from the earth, how to commune with the forces of the universe and not annoy them too severely, how to pass perfect memories from father to son, how to ensure the fertility of people, livestock and game and how to armor a person's skin so as to stop any blade or spear or arrow or sling stone.

It was this last spell, combined with the requirement in orthodox Shugoran magic for Human (or similar) sacrifice and cannibalism that brought on the next mess. When the Qin Dynasty collapsed under the weight of the first emperor's paranoia and his successors incompetence, suicide and the resultant power struggle, the men of the new "Leng Viet" decided to press their advantage. They launched a guerrilla campaign in an attempt to drive the Trieu Dynasty, with its mixed nobility of native southerners and Han Chinese, out of the Red River valley and establish a new native state.

Over the next hundred years, men raided trade routes and army barracks in the guise of screaming, bare-chested, tattooed (associated with bandits and convicts by the Chinese) savages, dragging captives off into the night or the forest in order to sacrifice them for either civilian or military magic. When they eventually lost their "War of the Bandits" (from the threefold causes of not getting any local nobility on their side, of terrifying the pants off their Viet kinsmen with their ferocity and the rumours of their religion and by the sheer weight of the eventual re-invasion by the armies of the Han Dynasty) they fled deep into the mountains of the West and South, being chided by the last of the original, goat-legged sorcerers for their foolish, ill-planned ambitions. From then, they had remained hidden and relatively peaceful, though remembered in whispered folk-tales as vicious, man-eating monsters.

After Marie had finished. Joseph sat in silence for a few minutes, digesting what he had just heard. The whole thing about magic was a bit.. hard to swallow. However, his own eyes had seen things that most would say were impossible. "You don't... you don't _hate _me now, do you?" Marie suddenly asked, her face awash in a worried panic, perhaps the culmination of every bout of anxiety she had ever experienced when Joseph had began edging onto the subject of her people's true nature. So much worry, so much fear and one wrong move now could break her heart.

For once, _just once_, he initiated the kiss this time.

**"**Does that answer your question?" As they pulled apart, he could see that most of her anxieties had melted away. "And... I hesitate to mention this, but about your parents restaurant..." He stopped when he saw her face, now an annoyed, knowing grimace that indicated that the next words out of his mouth should be chosen very carefully. "Uh... about the chicken, beef and pork they used. Was any of it... _officially_sacrificed?"

**  
><strong>Marie's grimace let up. "You need a priest to do anything _official_, and my parents are from farming families. Don't worry, we never served anyone up as the main course." She actually began to smile as she stood upright.

**"**Alright... but speaking of the main course, what about..." Joseph gulped nervously. "Me? Am I still going to be barbecue or did you actually convince anyone otherwise?"

The next news out of Marie's mouth was welcome indeed. "I didn't, but your professor won your life and those of the others after he talked with our Chief Priest. If I'm right, he and the rest of your team should be at the house of my paternal grandparents. Who _are_they, anyway?"

**"**My classmates. The Anthropology department at Miskatonic organized this trip with Professor Andover and a couple of us volunteered. " Still holding the bowl, Joseph began standing, his limbs still stiff and numb from hours of sitting. Despite this discomfort and the twitching shocks that came when blood began flowing free again, he followed her out the door, though not before taking and slinging a bag of rice over his shoulder at her asking, along with a braid of garlic bulbs and a small box of dried pork on a cord.

During his captivity, Joseph had been held in one of the storehouses by the river, a short way north of the village. Now, in the waning light of dusk, he and Marie made their way back on the path that wove through vegetable gardens and pig-pens until they reached the outlying houses. Through narrow alleys between house stilts and below the sounds of evening meals being eaten, past dogs and pigs drowsing in the under-crofts and along the great outer wall of the temple they traveled before moving into the main square and down the main thoroughfare.

******  
><strong>**"**It should be just after this next left, right across from the bronze-smith." As they walked along, they came to an intersection. On their right was a large house facing the street, belonging to the village bronze-smith and acting as a shop, a workplace and his family home. Across the main street from that house was a side street, lined by mostly smaller houses but each of them with soft lights in their windows. A few houses in, Marie led Joseph up the stairs of one house where familiar voices were laughing and making merry, including one brash female voice in particular that Joseph had come to know well.

As Marie lay down the lantern on the porch and opened the door, the voices became louder and clearer. When they entered, everyone was already seated (or at least kneeling). Albert and Malone were trading stories of their brief imprisonment and what they had seen, while Tracy was working her way through a bowl of green tea, apparently trying to cajole her way into the rice whiskey. Professor Andover was making small conversation with an old village man sitting at the head of the table who was wearing the brown jacket and skirt combo that was so common. Also at the table was a younger man and his wife, maybe a little older than Marie's parents, along with two teenage sons who had not yet received their tattooing. Some ways from the table, an elderly woman worked at a hearth lined with stone and brick, stoking a carefully controlled charcoal fire.

Everyone looked up at the new arrivals. The first to speak was the old man who had been talking to the professor, telling Marie to bring the rice and other ingredients over to the charcoal hearth so the evening meal could begin and then for them to sit down. After that was done, Joseph noticed that people were looking at him.

Apparently, it was time to make introductions.

**"**Joseph, I'd like you to meet my family on my father's side." After explaining that few of them could understand any English at all, Marie started introducing them. First came the old man, now identified as her paternal grandfather. Her grandmother, his wife, was the woman starting tending the fire at the hearth, her gray hair in an elaborate bun at the back of the head held together with a set of jade hairpins and wearing a long, black dress, similar to the garment that Marie had worn at the performance. Marie's uncle Huy and his wife An sat across from the Miskatonic students and beside them sat Cu'ong and Thao, their two sons...

Only _two_?

**"**Damn, the Kids!" Marie had been so busy with her boyfriend that the absence her younger cousins had escaped her until now. She got back up and went to the door, opened it and called down the street for them to get in the house now and try not to spill the water they were carrying. As she returned to where she had been kneeling, many hurried footsteps were heard coming up the outside stairs and the door opened again as five children entered as a crowd. The oldest, a girl who was perhaps eleven years old, was carrying two bronze pails of water in her hands while the second oldest, a boy of maybe ten, was carrying two more.

In fact, all the kids, which included two more boys and another girl, seemed to each be about a year apart down to a little boy of about seven years old. "Big families the norm around here?" Joseph asked his girlfriend as the water was transferred to cooking vessels and the ingredients collected.

Marie shrugged. "More or less: most farming families have at least three kids nowadays but the norm used to be around five around a century ago. This family is weird both ways: My uncle and aunt for having so many and my parents for just having me." 

Of course, sooner or later this casual reminiscing had to end. "So, Professor..." Tracy began, consciously deciding to get back on topic from the revery the two had been involved in. "You Said that you had something to tell us, about the ultimate purpose of this expedition?"

Neville Andover smiled the way that someone delivering a great and terrible revelation does. "As a matter of fact, I did." He motioned towards Malone, who was now extremely attentive. "This is Malone Roberts; for the last year he has been playing the part of my student, but he is far more than that. He is my assistant, my cohort... my protege in the context of the agency I work for. Tell me..." He seemed to direct this as every member of the audience (save Malone) who could speak English. "Have any of you heard of Delta Green?"

**"**What's that? Something in the Marine Corps?" It had _sounded_like an innocent question from Ms. Williams, but Joseph had shared a class, study groups and cram sessions with her for many months, and could recognize the first signs of building stress and panic when he saw them. They were amazingly similar to the signs that Marie herself had shown, with the difference of gripping objects such as a table edge with white-knuckle intensity now apparent.

**"**It's surprising that you haven't heard of it, considering the contacts in your community and the agencies reputation for... _extreme measures_before 1960." Now Andover turned to Albert Noyes. "Perhaps you have some notion of it... or its partner agency, Majestic 12. It is quite amazing work they're doing on the Yuggoth Project, especially on fungi." This seemed like it was crammed with potential clues, but honestly, Joseph couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Noyes, on the other hand, apparently could. He began smiling in surprise and recognition and began laughing at the revelation. "You mean... _you know about the Mi'go_?" Now Joseph was confused beyond all reckoning, and apparently so were Marie and Tracy.

**"**Know _about_them, know some of them, occasionally work alongside them. And if I may say, for half-fungus, half-arthropod, telepathic pains in the rear, they are remarkably easy to work with." What followed was Albert explaining the situation: the weirdest kinds of aliens you could imagine had contacted some humans in the 1800s and hired them to assist in mining certain valuable minerals in the hills of Vermont and Maine. Over the years, the men and women in their employ had received advice from these aliens as to potential marriage partners, first in terms genetic compatibility and superior traits for their offspring, then based on attractiveness as their understanding of human reproductive psychology increased. Finally, as they realized the subtle psychological and social rules of courtship, the began acting as human elites once did, organizing parties for unattached men and women and subtly directing candidates certain ways as they piloted artificial human body-shells around the dance floor. 

It sounded weird... but reassuring, even humorous. Even Tracy seemed to lighten up... as far as a hunted rabbit _could_lighten up.

**"**Mr. Clayton here is what you may call 'normal'. However, he was privy to manifestations not usual of this Earth." Joseph then told the assembled of what he had witnessed, with Professor Andover hypothesizing that the phonograph may have projected images and smells by some means of eldritch energies. Marie also retold the story of her people and of the deal that she had agreed to to gain access to the phonograph: one year back in the village and receiving her tattoos of adulthood. Nothing more and nothing less had been asked of her.

**"**And finally, we have Ms. Williams, whose tale has much to do with the founding of the organization and its present form." Here, Andover seemed to realize what kind of anxiety the girl was going through, and thus went slowly. "In the winter of 1928, the Miskatonic faculty was contacted by the United States Army to help investigate a series of strange attacks and abductions in Paige County, Virginia. As the base was in a primarily Quaker area, Miskatonic sent its lone member of faculty who was a Friend, one Hiriam Willows of Boston. While he remained among the Quaker farmfolk who knew the habits of the attacks, the army waged war against what was first believed to be a "degenerate" tribe of Iroquois but were later found to be white members of a strange fertility cult which engaged in human sacrifice."

The academic glanced towards Tracy, who had lowered her head, closed her eyes and grimaced at what was surely to come. He turned back to his eager listeners. "Before Willows left, he discovered strange objects in a secret room at the Longhouse Meeting Hall... objects which resembled those found on the slain cultists. He also, inadvertently, stumbled upon his hosts engaged in a ritual of apparent mourning, dressed as the Southern Iroquois would have been three hundred years ago, sacrificing pigs upon an altar at an isolated circle of standing stones, wailing and keening in grief." He looked back at Tracy. "This was the experience which convinced him that not all who worship the base forces of the universe are driven to evil nor insanity. It was also the experience that not all things should be released to the world, both for the worlds safety and that of the subjects."

After a moment's silence, Tracy spoke. "Excuse me." She got up walked out the door, somewhat to the surprise of her classmates, Marie and Marie's family. Marie then got up and went to follow, an act which inevitably drew Joseph after her.

They found Tracy sitting at the bottom of the steps, her chin on one balled fist, her other arm across her lap, her eyes staring into some unfathomable distance. Marie went forward first, sitting beside the girl as Joseph hung back. "I don't think we've been introduced. My name's Marie." When Tracy didn't answer. "You know, you don't have to feel bad about what other people did. Those guys the Army killed weren't your people, no matter how similar your rituals may have been."

**"**But they _were_my people." The answer came suddenly and surprised both listeners.

**"**Pardon?" Asked Joseph from the middle of the stairway.

**"**Those dangerous cultists that the professor told you about; they were English, Quakers even... or had been at one time." She sighed, not quite sure of herself on how to explain to outsiders the issue which had plagued her fears since the age of 10. "They were my peoples kin, descendants of those of us who answered the Union armies call for guerrillas during the Civil War. Before that, we'd adopted some sacrificial ritual from the Iroquois during the 1720s after some very hard winters. Where before they'd killed dogs, black deer and captured warriors... as well as captured women and children if it got _really_bad... to get good crops and health, we imposed strict limits and rules. There was to be no more human sacrifice, we killed our own livestock and above all, we accept the rituals as a gift from on high... even if the whole Christ thing was supposed to render sacrifice obsolete."

**"**I'd consider it a divine door prize. But about the Civil War?" Marie was trying to make the talk as nonthreatening as possible, considering the darkness which had settled over the village.

Getting back on topic, Tracy continued. **"**Well, we'd already been hiding escaped slaves for years on their way up to the major escape routes in Pennsylvania, but we felt that we couldn't do any more, especially with so much Confederate presence in the Shenandoah and the internecine aggression over secession. These people though... they wanted to do something. So, when a few Union officers wanted a meeting, they snuck off north. And when they came back, they brought _other_things with them. Old medieval codices which described Druidic rituals shockingly similar to our own but twisted and brutal, rituals which needed terror to be inflicted in the victims so that the full power of their life force could be drained. Their attitudes had changed as well; they became disdainful of the rest of the community: calling them weak, cowards, savages who refused to possess the full power of the Star Daughter and the Black Stag, fools who held onto their 'petty delusions' of morality. Well, after they went and made a mess of everything by capturing and sacrificing a Confederate squadron... the rest of the Longhouse Quakers shunned them, bidding them to go into the high mountains until they were ready to return. And so, a collection of about 50 men, women and children left the Valley and went into the high woods."

Joseph put something together in his head. "And I take it that the next time they returned was 60 years later, crazier than ever."

Tracy harrumphed. "You've got that right. And think about this while you're at it: by the 1920s, we'd been isolated for so long that it was starting to show in our features; the more inbred we became, the leaner our faces and the bonier our joints. By the time Willows got there, we just looked skinny and somewhat malnourished and with the right connections a few decades later, that began to get fixed." Her face got hard. "But what if Willows had finked on us, or Miskatonic sent one of their Congregationalist mama's boys instead? Do you realize what may have happened to us, especially in the 20s or 30s? Arresting us for a start, probably followed by forced sterilization and throwing us in crazy houses, sanitariums and prisons to rot. And that's just the adults!"

She was getting visibly angry. "Their kids, my great-grandparents, would have been shuffled off to orphanages or perhaps boarding schools if they thought we were just really pale Indians." She shuddered. "I've read about the shit that happened in Canada's residential school system and it gave me just as many nightmares as the thought of my ancestors being hunted like wolves and tortured for things they never did or for who they were." She turned to look at Marie and for the first time since he knew her, Joseph could put a name (that name being "very mildly inbred") on the features which he had labeled as 'rural-attractive' or 'cute in a farmer's daughter kind of way'. "I know that your people have been hiding, but at least you guys made the mistake of acting like total jerks to get your reputation! We never did anything wrong."

With that, Tracy got up, passed her companions and just as she was about to reenter the house, she paused and rethought something. "Well, never did anything wrong besides burning down that chicken barn, but that was an emergency! Neither my aunt nor my little cousin would be here if not for that and besides..." She turned her head to look at Joseph and Marie. "They wrote it off as an electrical fire." As Tracy went back into the house, Joseph thought that, while going against all conventional reason, his life made perfect sense for the first time in a very long while.


	5. Born on the Baiyue

Memories of Leng  
>Chapter 5<p>

Disclaimer: I honestly do not own much of anything in this story, some characters and one or two locales at most. The vast majority of content in this story is derivative of works penned by Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft and other authors of weird fiction.

Note: At the end of this chapter, I begin edging into innuendo and sexual tension. Being utterly unversed on the subject myself, I pretty much went with my instinct and literary convention. However, the point of using it is to provide a personality facet that Lovecraft's ascetic characters never quite seemed to possess... and provide a counterpoint to something to be introduced later.

Summary: Waking up in a strange place is never easy but for young Mr. Clayton, this difficulty will be eclipsed by one of the reasons they came here: fieldwork... He hopes.

**Spoonbill Village, Northernmost Quang Binh Province, SRV**  
><strong>June 30, 2011.<strong>

Dreaming of the past was no strange thing for Joseph Clayton over the past year. Before yesterday, the memory had been of his and Marie's last farewell, when she had told him that she was traveling to Vietnam for a one-year "hiatus" of sorts. Now, the memory of which he dreamed was of the occasion of Marie's 18th birthday, some months before she had informed him of her imminent departure. There had been food and gifts from their few friends in the community and, despite the national legal drinking age of 21, Marie was invited by her parents to sample one of the traditional medicinal liquors or _Ruou Thuocs_ of their native village, specifically a distilled rice whiskey of 100 proof in which had soaked a section of beef bone.

Also that night, despite her parents usual diligence, things between Joseph Clayton and Marie had become rather... _heated_. Just as the dream began to verge into the more pleasurable parts of the experience, a sound woke him quite suddenly. The noise, a sort of odd, _whooshing _crack...

_Gunfire_?!

Leaping out of his bed in a panic, Joseph landed face first in very nearly the same place where he had sat last night at dinner. Finally looking up after peeling his cheek off the floor, he saw that with the exception of himself and the normal women of the household (namely Marie, her Aunt and paternal Grandmother), the house was now empty. He had landed in the central depression which housed the table, seating mats and hearth and that was surrounded by the raised platforms where the party and those inhabiting the house had bedded down last night. "What _is_ that?!" Asked Joseph as another volley of cracks sounded, now followed audibly by a command to reload.

Although the question was general, the response he got was specific. "If you mean the gunshots, those are the men doing some target practice." Marie replied as she made to spoon some broth into a bronze bowl.

"Strange, those guys who brought us in didn't look like the type to actually use guns, what with the whole "barbarian" vibe they were giving off." Joseph sat properly at his seat as his girlfriend brought him what turned out to be soup of the kind that she usually favored as an appetizer. After thanking her, he began eating.

"Trust me, the hunters and warriors don't even like to _look_ at firearms; they think they're a demeaning farce of a weapon, 'farmers weapons' as they call them... but given that they're used by the farming men, it's a pretty accurate description." Ladling soup into her own bowl, she sat down beside Joseph at the table.

As the two older women looked on from their own work, the small talk went on between the two young ones: it turned out that these guns were old French repeating rifles from the 1920s rather than a modern Kalashnikov derivative and used an obscure 8mm cartridge that had to be produced by their agents in Vinh.

Then Joseph noticed something else. "You know, I just noticed something about your teeth... they're white."

"Of course they are. I know it may be a bit hard to find toothpaste out here but..." It was then that Marie caught on to what he had meant. "Oh, I guess you want to know why I haven't dyed them black yet, huh?" After Joseph nodded, Marie laid out, at the most basic level, what she wanted to take away from this trip. "Well, I've accepted lots of conditions for this visit. I did the tattooing, I help in the rice paddies, I've gone without modern clothing in almost every fashion, but _these_ babies..." She paused, did a tooth-bearing rictus grin and tapped her incisors with her right index fingernail three times. "I've worked far too long for this shade and I'm _not_ going to sacrifice them just so I can chew Betel nuts as a stimulant. Luckily, Dao managed to wrangle a small coffee supply from the Party minders; for a head priest he's not too bad, especially at this time of the morning."

Somehow, Joseph suspected that this refusal had less to do with cosmetic concerns and more to do with her determination to not turn into a clone of her mother (in all of her paranoid glory) but something else caught his attention. "What time is it, exactly? And where is everyone?" Joseph asked in between bites. Everyone (including his party and Marie's family members) had bedded down last night when the night grew dark and they had run out of things to do to stave off exhaustion. That they weren't here now...

Marie had an air of subtle amusement about her, possessed since untying Joseph last night. "We don't really keep time as an exact science around here. We have morning, evening, dawn, dusk, a rough idea of mid-day... and not much else. Even the passing of the seasons tends to become a blur in the constant raining and mist; without a calendar, time can play tricks on a person up here."

Her boyfriend did not exactly believe this. "You don't have any clocks? I mean... National Geographic even had to edit an alarm clock out of one of their photos in order to make an African hut look 'primitive' enough!"

Having never heard of this before, Marie could only shake her head in a form of self-depreciating humor. "It's like I said once: this place is _very_ rural and has historically been very isolated; it used to take _years_ for news to filter up here from the coast. As to your other question, although I'm unaware of the exact local time, your friends left the house about an hour ago." At this news, Joseph made a move to get up and join his friends (luckily, he had slept in his clothes) but was quickly (and effectively) shoved back down into his seat and told to finish his soup.

According to Marie, the kids had gone up onto the northern terraces with Tracy to show her the rice paddies (as she was ostensibly a farmer like they) while Albert had gone to retrieve their electronic equipment from the watermill where a small water-powered electric generator had been installed by the Border Defense force just a few years before. As to the Prof and his assistant... apparently, there'd been a meeting between some of the village bigwigs last night after the negotiations in the temple and Andover wanted to make sure that all the bad blood, anger and other annoyances had been cleared up before fieldwork was to commence.

As a small aside however, Marie did note that the powder of the Blue Forest Lotus did seem to have a slight lingering effect on those... _yet unaccustomed_ to the strangeness that was apparently all too common in the world. Since Andover, Malone, Tracy and Albert had come from experiences where the paranormal was slightly less para-, they had arisen early, eaten and left without any signs of sloth.

After they finished eating, they returned their bowls to the hearth, thanked the two women and then left to join Josephs fellows who were set to gather in the temple for a meeting with Tsan Pho Dao himself.

The way that they had left while holding hands, however, told Marie's aunt and grandmother that the village matchmaker might be about to encounter another problem regarding Marie... or at the very least, the root of her current problems involving Marie.

**Approximately 20 Minutes Later**

As two acolytes opened the great double doors of the temple from the inside, Joseph could only gape in awe at the sights before him. The transition from the world outside with it's bright sunlight and high humidity to the world of faintly lit darkness and incense smoke that contained itself within the temple of Spoonbill Village was.. almost magical. Given what he had already heard of, this might not just be a layman's impression.

The interior of the temple also gave the impression of a sort of duality: on one hand, this building was probably the safest place in the village. On the other hand, the very atmosphere exuded by their surroundings, with acolytes working at mysterious duties before the various shrines of dark stone that lined the walls, indicated to any visitor that they just may not leave this building alive, an indication only strengthened by a large block of dark stone at the rear third of the interior. The sides of this almost altar-esqe block of Jadeite were engraved with many characters which appeared to be a bizarre mixture of Khoa Dau (the old script of Vietnam), the curving loops of Javanese and something even odder and older, resembling some of Albert's research on the old Seal Scripts of the Zhou... but not quite. The top of the block was formed into a shallow basin with notches for something of a liquid nature to run down into a series of channels (and from the look of it, recently had). The basin was large enough to hold a buffalo of considerable size and probably had many times over the years.

According to what Marie had told him, it could also hold an adult Human male.

Before the stone was low table on which was spread a yellow silken cloth. Upon the cloth, several strange items in ivory, jade, various metals and wood were placed, all seemingly used for the purpose of divining. However, what was most interesting about the table were the figures which were sitting behind it.

The first and more distinctive figure was that of an old man in an ornate gold headdress and voluminous red robes. While allegedly in his early 70s and not nearly as old as some people he had met, Joseph could see that something had wizened his features to the point where he appeared decades older than he should. What hair could be seen was wispy and white, being contained mostly in a braided beard and a mustache that looked like it might have belonged on Fu Manchu if said character had survived to the age of 126. The man's eyes, however, were clear and bright, and his face held signs of amusement under the formal grimace; Later, Joseph would identify said amusement as the product of the old, sing-song adage of "I Know Something You Don't Know".

But not yet.

Professor Andover, at the head of the party that included his students and Marie, led them to a point just before the low table and motioned them to kneel and bow. When they all knelt, Andover finally spoke in the most reverent tone that Joseph had ever heard applied to this or any other form of Mon-Khmer. "_In the spirit of respect and friendship I greet you, Tsan Pho Dao, Oracle of the Jade Bones, Sage of the Blood and Master of the Way of Leng_."

Seemingly placated by the proper formal greeting, Tsan Pho Dao answered back.. but not in the way that everyone was expecting him to.

"And in the spirit of Peace and Hospitality I greet you, Professor Neville Andover of Miskatonic University." Replied the Chief Priest... in perfect, unaccented English. As a few heads raised and eyes gazed at him in surprise, the Priest shrugged and offered an explanation. "A Language Acquisition Spell: sacrifice a pig and the world opens up to you. Now, I believe that you were to explain the purpose of this visit, were you not?"

Recovering remarkably well, Neville Andover explained exactly what he wanted to come out of this short, hopefully first survey. As the professor laid out the intricacies of the ethnographic process including both "emic" and "etic" (subject and researcher-derived, respectively) observations of daily life and material culture, interviews, historical research and recording of various events, Joseph slowly became aware of something. The first thing he noticed was that Marie's left hand, still held and being held by his right hand as they sat next to each other, was exerting a steady pressure that was much increased from when they were walking toward the temple or entering it. He also found that she was looking sideways towards the _second_ figure near the altar stone,

This figure was a woman, somewhere between 60 and 70 years of age and rather less weathered than the man she sat beside and slightly to the rear of, her facial tattoos an asymmetric collection of delicate swirls and tiny trapezoids. Dressed in a fine formal gown of red and dark blue silk with gold filigree, she wore many sorts of jewelry from combs in her gray hair to bracelets of jade and gold on her wrists and even pendants and beads dangling from the ends of the jade hairpins that seemed to be ubiquitous in the hairstyles of married women in this village. Whereas this woman wore an expression of serene indifference, the look what Marie was giving her could easily be described as "stink-eye". While Joseph had been privy to a very mild version of this expression when he had almost implied cannibalism on the menu of her parents restaurant, the last time he had witnessed the full force of such a look was when they were in the fifth grade and a classmate had the gall to insult her parent's tattoos.

"And Albert Noyes.. you know of the Whisperers? The mushrooms of Yuggoth?" Tsan Pho Dao asked, examining the oracular bauble on the table which apparently indicated Noyes background. Joseph's attention was brought back to the conversation by this question and the affirmative answer from Albert. "Tell me then..." Asked Dao. "Have you encountered the Bringer of Strange Joy?"

"Not face to face and neither have any others in my town. I've heard _of _it... but almost as a legend across space and dimensions." Albert shrugged. "I still don't understand what it really is."

"Nobody ever truly does." Dao replied sagely before moving onto the next token. Upon picking up and examining a piece of carved buffalo horn, his eyes flickered to Ms. Williams. "It seems that you share something with our people, Ms. Williams. The bones indicate that you have participated in the rites of sacrifice, much as we do?"

"Yes, but like I've said before, we've only ever sacrificed our own livestock. I once helped to hold down a pig, alright but... I don't know, we never wanted to kill people and we never needed to. Some of the other groups we keep running into, though..." Tracy sighed after she realized that she had almost began rambling. "We try so hard to keep all of the weirdos in line year after year... and year after year it's always the same: some crazy bastard tries to sneak in a human sacrifice, we get pissed and threaten to call the cops, they try to blackmail us into allowing it and then the saner worshipers just take the intended victim back where they came from, none the wiser on where they were. I just worry that someday, something horrible will happen on our doorstep and that we'll be blamed while the assholes slink off into the woods." She then looked up at the Chief Sorcerer in embarrassment. "I'm sorry that you had to hear that.. and sorry about the "crazy bastard" crack. I'm sure you're a very nice person."

Affecting a look of near-pity, Tsan Pho Dao offered a little of what he had seen in her future. "The stress of such a life can be hard to bear... but I sense that help has already held out a hand. All that remains is for someone to be brave enough to accept it." As Tracy thought this bit of fortune-cookie wisdom over, the priest turned his head towards Joseph, who opened his mouth to speak. However, Dao held up two claw-like fingers to stop him. "We know of you, Joseph Clayton and as of yet, nothing much outside the norm have you gazed. However, I would appreciate hearing the reasons on why you ceased playing your sport when you ventured away from home."

Already prepared for such clarity of soothsaying, the young man shrugged. "It turns out that I wasn't tall enough to play college basketball. However, even if I had been.. I don't I would have been content to play for a team which called itself the, and I quote, 'Mommas Boys'." Albert groaned in embarrassment at the name while Tracy found reason to snicker, both knowing that the Miskatonic "MB's" were a long-time running punchline for the college leagues.

With that interlude over, assignments were made. Tracy, coming from farm country, would stay with Marie's Grandparents, conduct interviews among the farmers and record their daily lives, up to and including working alongside them on the terraced rice paddies. Albert, displaying more aptitude with technology due to his communities alliance with the so-called "Mi'go", would be stationed at the household of the Village Bronze-caster, who supplied many of the tools and utensils of the village. As they were also one of the most socially connected families in the village, the large house they inhabited would make an ideal central base for the expedition.

Malone, as he had existing skills and reputedly the strongest stomach, would cover the operation of the Temple and thus be overseen by Professor Andover, who would be staying there as well. As for Joseph... for Joseph, it was decided, quite surprisingly, that he would live in the house of the hunters that had encountered the party.

As the guests rose and began filing out, Tsan Pho Dao watched the retreating figures intently until the door closed behind them. He turned to the woman sitting beside him. "_Well, __**that**_ _certainly explains why the girl has rebuffed all of the potential suitors you pushed her way._"

The woman's mask of indifference gave way to shock and then the stirrings of anger. "_You mean... __**him**__?! Are you saying that she, of her own accord, chose some foreign devil instead of one of her own kind?"_

"_I wouldn't be that harsh on the boy. He's appears not of the same fragile, treacherous mindset as __the others we have encountered... if his having come this far without screaming is any indication." _Since this morning, Dao had know that something like this was coming; his wife was comfortable in both her power and her confidence in her decisions and a conflict was bound to happen given the way Thuch and Thanh had raised their daughter in the West.

"_You __**know **__what I mean! It was bad enough that her parents gave her a French name and now she's been consorting with one of them as well!_"

Dao sardonically smiled. "_I'm fairly sure that the boy is English; they and the French have the kind of mutual dislike for each other that we and the Han do. As to the boy himself, I've put him far away from where Marie is staying, but she still will have to act as an interpreter for the group._" He picked up a small, silvery disc from the table and began to examine it. "_But given her confidence in him, I feel that we should observe what happens before making any moves._"

The woman, known now only by her title of Matchmaker and by a few in her past by the name of Chau, looked at her husband in an appraising way. "_You __**know **__something, don't you_?"

Still gazing at the disc that had told him something of the Clayton boy, a Unites States quarter-dollar coin circa 1961, Dao chose his words carefully. "_What I know is dwarfed by what I suspect. But... what I do know is that there is __**something **__about this boy... something that you may have to take into consideration. The threads of his fate show that something is about to pull at them... but whether for good or ill or who will pull, I do not know."_

He did _not_ know but, as his gaze lifted from the coin (specifically a series of scratches upon the face of Washington) towards a winding pattern of black fretwork above the main door, he _suspected _that whatever may be coming toward the boy would be very familiar indeed.

**Spoonbill Village, Early Afternoon**  
><strong>June 30, 2011.<strong>

As part of his integration into the community, Joseph had acquiesced into wearing the local clothing: a kilt and short sleeved jacket in brown cotton with geometric patterns of black lines and dots.

However, there was one piece of clothing that the young man was already beginning to miss.

"You mean _everyone_ goes commando around here? Couldn't I have at least kept my boxers on?" Having never dressed this way outside his regular use of towel or robe for showering, Joseph was having a bit of trouble getting used to it.

"Yes we do and _no_, you can't have your shorts back; those things absolutely _stunk_! Heavens know what was going on in there." As they made their way from her grandparents house to their destination, materials and devices at hand, they were drawing a fair amount of stares from people going about their business, most of them absolutely bewildered by the conversation that was going on. However, Joseph could have imagined that in that last statement there was some... not amusement, although Marie's tone since he had gotten his head off the metaphorical chopping block indicated that she was much more at ease in this place than he was. But there had been a hint of suggestion, a certain playfulness of tone that suggested that she knew full well some of the things which had gone on in those shorts.

And then he connected the "going commando" remark with... _Oh dear_. "And you..?" Joseph began, quite unsure on how to word the question.

"I've kept that part of my dignity, thank you very much." There was a sense of arrogance and snootiness in Marie's reply, but it was a false arrogance and a playful, imitation snootiness at heart. "Alright, so I cheated a bit but there are things I want to hang onto, even if leaving here becomes... difficult." They stopped in front of a house near the entrance to the village temple.

"Anything I should know about this guy?" Joseph asked his girlfriend, desperate to get his mind out of the gutter.

"First, he's a hunter, archer and scout. He's from the Clan of the Spider, which is one of the really old warrior lineages in this village. Second, he's also got a wife who came from a village in Laos, a Tai speaker, so there may be a language barrier. They have a son in the age range of my younger cousins. Third... well, many of the warriors do a little sorcery on the side. The odd... _mutation_ occasionally pops up." There was again an awkwardness, as she was apparently describing another bit of weirdness that had slipped past the descriptions of last night.

Absorbing this new description and momentarily deciding that his libido was a somewhat more comfortable avenue, Joseph mustered courage and.. well, kissed Marie again. "I love you and... and I promise that if this goes bad, I'll make sure you get out of here." This statement was supposed to be one of affirmation but the worry also showed through.

Momentarily flustered by her boyfriends brashness, Marie nevertheless recovered quickly. "Hey, if things go bad, _I'll _be the one dragging _you_ out of here..." Here, her tone turned softer, more grateful and more genuine. "But thanks all the same." Everything said, that kind of commitment was nice to have reinforced, even if it did point to some creeping uneasiness with the whole thing.

Still, it was only the second day.

As she went up to the door, Joseph thought that it was probably a good thing that he would not be able to watch her leave... and it was probably also a good thing that neither the mens nor the womens kilts were very snug.

If he wasn't careful, this was going to turn into a very embarrassing few weeks.


	6. Cautious Entrance and Hopeful Exit

Memories of Leng

Chapter 6

Disclaimer: As before, I do not own anything. The Cthulhu Mythos belongs to Howard Philip Lovecraft, August Derleth and others among that Revered Circle. Delta Green belongs to Pagan Publishing.

Authors Note: After finding some illustrations of Pre-Chinese Vietnamese women's clothing (which appear more Javanese than anything), I feel I have to incorporate it in some way into the story. To this end, the simple coat/kilt/upper undergarment combo is most likely the working clothing of farmers and other "peasants" while the hanfu-esqe robes of Tsan Pho Dao and his wife may be far from the standard worn by the elite of the village.

Synopsis: Joseph gets introduced to his (first) assigned subjects, including military study and domestic work. Later that night, an unwelcome visitor makes a surprise appearance.

* * *

><p><strong>Spoonbill Village, Northernmost Quang Binh Province, SRV.<strong>

**June 30, 2011.**

Considering their first encounter, this meeting was going rather well.

"_No, no, I assure you that I have had quite enough… well, if you insist…_" In the course of explaining his task to the household he would be staying in, Joseph Clayton had been offered tea at the behest of the mistress of the household and all three times, he had acquiesced. She was attending her husband in fine cotton clothes of white and black, the cut more resembling something out of Javanese dancing than anything worn in Indochina during the past thousand years. Their son, called from his lessons for the presentation, was sitting at the far end of the room, listening to what was going on. While he had repeated much the same spiel that Professor Andover to the house's three inhabitants, he had sipped at his bowl almost automatically as one would with water, clear onto what was now his fourth helping. Although not unpleasant, the drink had considerably more kick to it than even the strong brews typical of Vietnamese green tea.

What perplexed Joseph was that he couldn't identify the extra ingredient. It wasn't peppers, having no discernible remains or even the raw chemical heat of capsaicin. It could be ginger, but the heat was of an utterly different kind than any ginger he had ever experienced.

Then again, the additive could just as well be Tarantula venom given the figure he was giving his introduction to.

His name, as he had given it, was Noc. He was the most experience hunter, archer and scout of the village, was of an incredibly ancient lineage and, incidentally, was the first person of this strange, isolated village that he had seen. His tattoos all featured arachnid themes of legs, webbing and fangs and his eyes…

Marie had mentioned that some of the warriors practiced sorcery with mutative effects. If that was what caused Nocs eyes to become all black, seemingly all pupils and tempting Joseph to mentally refer to the man as "Spider Eye", then maybe those three weirdoes they caught in the biology labs back in February were onto something after all.

Sitting in the main reception area of the home, replete with decorations of strange latticed designs and black lacquer, Joseph watched carefully as Noc finished examining one of his bowstrings before his eyes darted around the room. On the wall, several bows hung in their unstrung state: the white and banded flatbow he had first witnessed, several simple bows of light colored cane and even one recurve bow made of dark red hardwood.

"_So that is your request: to hear the stories of our history, to observe the operation of a household of status and to… take part in our activities_?" Throughout the introduction of this man and the repetition he had given of the Professors offer, Noc had examined all aspects of him closely… and had not been impressed. He had some muscle tone, but everything else about him absolutely screamed that he was some sort of priest or urban scribe in training. Besides, the combination of the girl's cues toward him and his reaction to his tea made it clear: if the boy had been a virgin, steam would have been pouring out of his ears. That made things difficult (and potentially dangerous) for everyone.

Besides, very few people in this village held any affection at all for someone with Joseph's skin tone.

After receiving affirmation of Joseph's duties, Noc laid out the rules. "_Know this: you will record the histories when they are told to you. You shall ask questions when you are allowed and you shall observe what you shall participate in what you are allowed to participate in. No pestering me with questions, no sneaking around trying to observe the women and children and no and I mean no trying to wheedle out information through trickery. We had quite enough trouble with that sort of thing the last time around_."

Joseph was immediately insulted, even though he did not how it as he automatically agreed. Still, two things bothered him. First, underneath the gold and bronze bangles that decorated the forearms and ankles of Nocs wife, Joseph had noticed strange scars, akin in shape to the marks that sperm whales bore from their battles with giant squid.

Second… what did Noc mean by the _last_ time around?

**That Night…**

As he lay awake, Joseph realized how exhausting the day had been. As it turned out, he was probably doing to spend most of his time in this house as a sort of a servant: documenting and participating in cooking and chores, handling domestic duties and picking little things up only as Noc's wife deemed appropriate. No real questions answered, no interesting discoveries or scandals or surprises… just ordinary ethnographic work.

It wasn't made any better that his libido was getting annoyed at the 'busy' signals it kept receiving. However, there had been no real opportunity to talk with Marie after last night, with all the revelations of cannibalism and sorcery and other things that probably should have made his stomach turn.

_/Maybe it would be better if they __**had**__ made your stomach turn./_ Came a wheedling little multi-voiced dialogue from inside his head… from inside his head, but not _originating_ from him.

_Oh no._ Joseph thought with a mental groan. _Not you idiots again! I thought you gave it up after the last time._

_/The __**last **__time? You mean when you were in the thrall of carnal lusts, disgracing your heritage?/_ The dominant voice changed from one of the old WASP lords to that of an aristocratic dowager that had been ancient even when Granny Clara had been a girl. /_Maybe now that you know what her kind get up to, you will listen to reason and find a girl more suitable to a young man of your station./_

_Her parents are just as middle class as mine are, thank you all very much. _Joseph snarked back mentally, fully knowing how these… _wraiths_ felt about his relationship with Marie and savoring the thought of causing them anguish.

_/You know full well what is meant. What is not understood is why the other girl did not so arouse your… passions./_

_Oh please, her family is just as drenched in sorcery as these guys, it's just that they're more polite about who they slice open. Besides, I don't really think you'd have acted any differently if it had been Tracy I'd been with that night instead of Marie, inbred and rural as she apparently is._ He remembered clearly that night: how these voices (who he was fairly sure were not the products of schizophrenia despite superficially similar symptomatology), had come to him in the midst of what should have been unimaginable passion and communion with his girlfriend (though with was much more awkward, rushed and possibly painful than desired). Even as the passion mounted, their insults became worse: the taunts, the archaic, hateful rhetoric, the most vicious slurs directed against Marie and him. And yet he had forged on, continuing despite the rising chorus of insane voices inside his head… or even because of them, for as they blasphemed against all that Marie was, all the little things that made Joseph love her all the more, he could tell that his defiance was causing them actual pain and torment… and even through the pleasures of the flesh, he took small, sadistic delights in causing pain and anguish to these assholes who claimed authority as his forbearers.

Now Joseph was getting annoyed… and cranky. _Look, I don't have to listen to you idiots, even if you do claim to be my ancestors. You came from a completely different world whose rules do not apply to me. Also, the instruments of your authority are gone: no money, no status, no companies or contacts or friends in high places. All that's left are a bunch of ugly little voices in the wind. Why don't you all just blow away? _He was tired of his, of having to listen to these inane snobs that he had learned to loath in the abstract and now hated in the concrete. He hated their hate-filled dismissals of all other peoples and cultures, their smug superiority and the generalized arrogance that seemed to drip from the voices.

When they didn't respond, Joseph took it as a sign. "Good." He said aloud, as softly as his sense of satisfaction allowed.


	7. Shadow of the Past

Memories of Leng

Chapter 7

Disclaimer: I don't own anything, except for perhaps the original characters. The horror of Lovecraft, the iron-thewed action of Howard and the wonder of Clark Ashton Smith all belong to their respective wordsmiths, with all other characters and creations belonging to theirs (except for my main characters, of course).

Synopsis: Joseph goes on the hunt under the shadow of fear, an eldritch sacrifice arrives amid rumors of tragedy… and new revelations about a member of the party emerge.

**Spoonbill Village,**

**Northernmost Quang Binh Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam**

**July 2, 2011**

Two young adults walked up the path beside the bronze-casters shop to the barren hillside and the forest edge beyond. "So, how do you like things so far?" Marie asked as she and Joseph made their way up the rough-hewn stone steps. Their destination was the house of the village woodcutter and charcoal-burner, a place that also doubled as a furniture workshop and, importantly for this journey, the villages' firearms armory.

"Not that bad. I've been doing domestic work for the past few days but neither Noc nor his wife seems to really be a slave driver. Actually, they feel more like people who understand that they're training a new servant." Joseph thought on something. "I'm actually surprised that he and the other hunters allowing me to accompany them. They neither seem to respect me or anyone who would stoop to use a gun, so I wonder why they changed their attitude."

It was here that Marie began ruminating on something, an old thought that had given her more than her share of bad dreams. "There are some things worth surrendering pride for, Joseph. Tell me, have you seen those weird scars on the ankles and arms of Nocs wife?"

"You mean those marks that look like Giant Squid wounds? Yes, but what about them?" Joseph suddenly stopped. "What _are_ they, anyway?"

Having stopped also, Marie sighed, a sense of foreboding covering her features. "When I asked that myself, they didn't tell me much more than the stories I'd already heard when I was a kid: legends about ghosts, devils from the mist, 'shadows that drink blood' is what they called them sometimes. But what I got here is that those _Shugoran_ priests that saved my people weren't just going _to_ somewhere. They were running i_from/i_ somewhere, someone or some_thing_, something that no one is willing to talk any further about." Marie started forward again at such a pace that her boyfriend had to hurry to catch up.

Getting the feeling that nothing more was going to be answered on that subject for a good while, Joseph changed track. "How are the others getting on? I've been stuck in the house most of the day and I haven't really had a chance to talk to either the Prof or my classmates."

Happy to shift from thoughts of chilling horror, Marie chuckled with increasing mirth as she began going back up the trail. "From what I've heard, Albert's been filming every step in the bronze making process that he can, not to mention all the casting processes and various uses of equipment. The only reason that he hasn't been thrown out yet is because the family's elder patriarch has taken a liking to… well, not just him, but all of you guys, just from the descriptions alone. Your Professor and his assistant have basically locked themselves in the temple: no word out yet, but I assume that they're observing normal operations. As for Tracy…" Here, Marie began acting a little odd. "She talks in her sleep, if you didn't know."

"Really?" Joseph responded interestedly. Not reacting the way that she had feared, Marie relaxed a little from the paranoia she had been wrangling with.

"Yeah, and the strange thing is that it's in… well, _tree-ish. _And then there's the tattooing on her back as well." Marie went on talking, relieved that her fear seemed to have been senseless.

Before he could answer his girlfriends increasingly chatty descriptions, a thought crossed Josephs mind on exactly why such a thing might be mentioned. "Why would you ask me if I knew…" Then the realization hit him and he stopped cold. "Were you thinking that… Tracy and I?"

Marie stopped as well. "It's not unknown to happen, you know." Marie answered the implied question almost defensively, as if trying to justify her momentary paranoia. "Sweethearts get separated and sometimes… one finds companionship elsewhere. Especially with, _you know_." Marie tapped the side of her head, indicating the "visitors" that had first cursed Joseph Claytons existence during High School.

Joseph snorted in an amused, disparaging way. "Please don't give them that much credit. I've ignored, rebuked and insulted those jerks so many times that I've made a virtual bloodsport out of it. Besides, if I'd made any moves towards Tracy, Albert would have killed me."

"Wait, those two… they're together?" Marie asked, wondering how she'd missed _that_.

"Intimately so, yes." This was all Joseph was willing to say, himself not wishing to examine too closely the memory of walking in on his dorm-mate and his girl when they had neglected to put a sock on the doorknob. "Anyway, as to these voices, I went to the psychology department to see if I could discover just what was causing it."

Marie waited a heartbeat before plunging into the vital question. "And what did they say?" If her boyfriend did indeed have Schizophrenia, then he needed help: drugs to control the symptoms and perhaps therapy to help him conquer whatever dark corners of his psyche were feeding these voices.

If it was something _else_… then perhaps the local sorcerers might need to be consulted before long.

Joseph sighed. 'Whatever is going on inside my head, the geeks with the scanning equipment are pretty sure that this isn't a case of medical Schizophrenia. They say that the symptoms are all wrong, the voices aren't persuasive enough… and that I don't have any of the telltale injuries on the brain that would suggest medical reasons. And then there was the time they hooked me up to the EEG during one of my 'episodes'." He paused, wondering just how to proceed but, since he was already experiencing strange things, he decided just to press on. "The guys swore that, before the equipment shorted out, at least two additional wavelengths were being read beside mine." With a shrug, Joseph summed up his thoughts. "Ever since I came here and heard all of the seemingly crazy stories from you and the others… I don't know, but what I've gone through just makes sense now, at least in knowing that it actually _can_ happen."

Marie smiled. _Yes, we definitely need to consult the priests. "_Come on, we've talked enough and you need to get that rifle before you head out."

And rifles there were, all secured inside a triple locked room in the back corner of the woodcutter's house. They looked like Berthier carbines, French bolt-action repeaters from the First World War… but they were not the only guns present. "Is that a _Hotchkiss_?" Joseph asked in a voice combining bemusement and astonishment. Among the rifles and a few, scattered revolvers sat a machine-gun still on its tripod and looking impossibly well-maintained for being kept in the back room of a house located in a tropical moist forest.

"An M1914 by the looks of it, if the pictures I've seen are at all accurate. There's a story behind it, but I only know that only the oldest elders know it." Marie replied, having picked up of the Berthier Carbines and handing it to Joseph. The ammunition was kept in a chest under a trapdoor in the main part of the house as a safety measure so they'd have to go back to pick it up. But then she asked the question that she probably should have asked before they left the village proper. "Speaking of guns, since when did you shoot?"

"There's a gun range in Arkham; Tracy and Albert invited me along for a few lessons before Thanksgiving. She's the one with actual hunting experience and I think he only came along to check out the engineering on the pieces. It wasn't that much fun, but I think what I learned in getting my license will help on this." Joseph began inspecting the carbine he had been given, finding it oiled and well-maintained as any other firearm in the room. There was a question that had to be asked, however?

Where did they get all these guns?

**b15 minutes Later/b**

Marie walked up the stairs to her grandparent's house. She was supposed to act as a translator and informant for the expedition, having prior contacts inside the community and being a member first by blood and more recently by initiation. Truth be told, she had a feeling that old Tsan was really acting as gatekeeper in his interactions with Professor Andover while she was playing the part of a more convenient and mobile ambassador, Tsan having never left the temple save by palanquin in almost forty years.

Walking in the door, Marie was unprepared for another surprise. She saw Tracy sitting before the camera as her Grandmother and Aunt watched, waiting to begin filming the day's questions and activities, even making a short introductory statement... but not in English.

"_And as soon as the translator gets here, we'll begin the second day of_... Hey Marie, you almost scared me there." Here was an audible note of guilt as Tracy hastily switched from the strange language that she had been using to the carefully modulated, Patsy Cline-accented English she had used since Marie had met her. Marie had heard it, and Tracy knew that she had heard... and Marie knew that Tracy knew.

"Yeah, I've gotten that reaction a few times since I got here." Marie joked, knowing that humor had the power to break tension. "So... what language were you speaking in anyway? I'm afraid I didn't recognize anything about it." Her female elders watched closely, knowing that something had happened but being ignorant of other languages, were unsure of exactly what.

Tracy grinned bitterly. "I'd be more surprised if you _did_ recognize it. It's... well, it's not really a language _per se_, but a patois of a couple languages, with Early Modern English, Ohio Valley Shawnee, Coastal Algonquian, some Iroquoian loanwords having to do with ritual and bits of Eastern Siouan." Tracy let out the deep breath she had been using to list all those languages. She was getting more comfortable now. "I guess it won't do any harm if I told you, seeing as we're almost in the same boat."

Tracy beckoned Marie to sit, turning off the camera as she did. "The kids in my town learn it... well, sort of as a first language; English is really more of a first-and-a-half language for us. We got exposed to it through TV and then when we went to school, but most of our formative years were spent listening to and absorbing the patois around the house. Most of us never really let go of it as a language for our own private conversations."

Marie reflected on this... but was also noting some of the features on Tracy's face: the high, rounded cheeks, her high-bridged nose, the way that her eyes were less the bright crystal blue of stereotype and more of a dark, cloudy blue resembling ultramarine. "I hope you don't mind me saying this, Tracy but does your family have any Native American ancestry? I don't mean to pry, but you do kind of have the look."

Tracy considered this for a moment before giving an affirmative nod. "My father's paternal grandmother was from the Oklahoma Kiowa. My mother, as far as can be traced, is also about an eighth, this time one-eighth Shawnee, which seems to be the median for Longhouse." She got an odd, contemplative look on my face. "That's another one of those things that we try not to mention to outsiders, even though they tend to notice it anyway. Back in the old days, admitting it would have been a quick ticket to using a segregated washroom or worse. And now?" Tracy shrugged. "Now it's considered cool, while the inbreeding still makes us look like freaks."

Marie decided to test something, just for her own sake. "Albert doesn't seem to think you're a freak." The more she thought about it, she had more in common with Tracy than first realized. Both of them had lived life right on the edge of themselves and their kin being recognized as something _other_, something foreign to the perceived natural order of the world. Both of them could sense the threat of possible revelation... and knew what it was to try to trust someone with these secrets.

"Hey, you're talking about a guy whose family has worked for _alien mushroom bugs_ for the last hundred years. A bit of mild inbreeding is probably the most normal thing Al's ever experienced." Here there was definitely affection to her voice, a cue that no matter what other strangeness they were involved in, there was a loving relationship between the two.

At this thought Marie smiled, thanking the ancestors for a little bit of normalcy in this year-long cavalcade of oddities that she had flung herself into. Then another question sprang forth. "Did you know about the whole alien thing when you guys were at Miskatonic?"

Tracy shook her head. "No, but then again, he was always kinda spacey." Marie couldn't help but giggle at this bad pun. Tracy went on, the affection still in her voice. "Seriously, the thing about Miskatonic is that, after awhile, you begin getting the feeling that almost everyone else is holding something close to their chest, thinking each word over before saying it. It's then that you realize that... you're not alone, that almost everyone else is as paranoid as you are, having something to hide." She looked towards Marie. "Everyone except for your Joseph, that is. The only thing strange about him that I noticed was that romance was nowhere on his radar at all."

"You'd be surprised, actually." Marie answered cryptically. Before Tracy could ask, she turned back the camera back on, signaling the beginning of the interview session.

**That evening**

Sweaty, hot, dirty and exhausted, Joseph Clayton exited the forest with Noc and the other hunters. Between all of them, the hunters had brought down a Sambar stag and three small muntjacs. Joseph, for his part, had escaped being gored by a wild boar only by dodging its charge, rolling into a hollow under a log and then shooting it in the head at point-blank range when it tried to go after him. For this feat, the hunters designated him "master of the pit" when they roasted it at tonight's feast. It had sounded like an honorable title, but Joseph could guess that they were making him little more than a cook, a traditionally female position.

Still, it was an in and it would probably be research gold.

He was entirely less enthusiastic about what else was coming back with them.

When he and the group of hunters came into the village proper, he saw Marie and the taller, paler form of Tracy coming towards him, having been up on the family terrace transplanting rice seedlings. Due to her fair skin, Tracy was wearing the largest hat she could while her arms and shins had been slathered with sunblock. Marie had already taken hers off.

As they neared him, Marie slowed to a stop, seeing the grim look on Josephs face. Tracy looked at her in confusion, then at Joseph and from his stony face understood that something was wrong. "What is it?" Marie asked her boyfriend.

Joseph sighed. "When the hunters brought us in, were we supposed to be for any kind of important sacrifice?"

"Well, the Rhinoceros Festival is supposed to happen any day now. It's when we recharge the mist that surrounds the village to keep us hidden." Marie looked around Joseph to where one of the hunters was leading a group of people into the village. They looked like quite a bedraggled bunch, many of them thin and in questionable health. There were also two women who may have been considered beautiful if not for the look in their eyes that they had been through several levels of hell before coming here.

But for all these conditions, they did not look frightened of their tattooed guides.

Noticing where Marie was looking, Joseph offered explanation. "We met up with them about a mile down the trail. Apparently the government sent up street people as some fresh blood for you guys. And that's not all. Apparently..." Here, he lowered his voice "One of the families that were living incognito in Vinh got killed a few nights ago: Father, mother, twelve year old boy... from what I heard it sounded like some sort of animal tore them up inside their apartment... and no blood was spilled."

Tracy looked like she was going to vomit at the news, while a look of dread overcame Marie, as old legends came forth out of the terrifying mist of childhood nightmare to become shadows in the waking world. "Is there anything else?" Marie asked quietly.

Now it was Joseph's turn to look back at the party coming out of the forest, which were now carrying a man by his hands and feet on a pole, his mouth gagged and his eyes blindfolded. "Only that they also sent you a sacrifice. From what they said, he's a drug-runner, sexual slaver and a general bad example of low-level underworld scum."

Marie, still in shock over the news of the murders, was perhaps not picking and choosing the words coming out of her mouth. "Which mean he's gonna taste worse than the fish sauce."

At these words, both gruesome and almost ridiculous, both her lover and her friend goggled at her.


End file.
